Ring the bells that still can ring

by chuckofish

After four months at the finisher, my elephant pillow is back! Pretty fab, if I don’t say so myself.

Reminded by a reference to it in Sunday’s sermon, we watched Apollo 13 (1995) on Sunday night. Directed by Ron Howard, it dramatizes the aborted 1970 lunar mission, Apollo 13, which was America’s fifth crewed mission to the Moon and was intended to be the third to land. It is a good movie. It avoids politics and sticks to the story–a story which is exciting enough without embellishment. Indeed, it is an amazing story of the heroic actions of a large group of NASA scientists and the astronauts themselves in order to bring them and their disabled lunar module home. It is a story of smart people using their god-given brains and not giving up in the face of terrible odds. Ron Howard plays it straight and it is a good movie, certainly his best.

I remember the events portrayed in the movie vividly. I was in the eighth grade and I remember how terribly anxious everyone was. We actually watched the re-entry of the module on television at school. It could have ended in disaster on national television, but thankfully, it did not. It ended in triumph.

President Nixon awarding the three Apollo 13 astronauts the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Yesterday I attended a live-streamed funeral service for another old friend from my flyover institute. Leonard was 95 and a veteran of both WWII and Korea. When he was 90 he published a memoir of his harrowing experiences as a medic in Korea. He wrote the memoir over several years in a creative writing class he took at LLI (a class he later facilitated.) He was a very interesting guy. He was half Episcopalian and half Jewish, but when he married the daughter of a prominent Jewish family, he became a full-time Jew. We chuckled about that and about a lot of things. It was a blessing and a privilege to be able to spend time with him and to know him.

He who makes peace in his high holy places, may he bring peace upon us, and upon all Israel; and say Amen.

Here’s Leonard’s favorite song by that other Leonard:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.